Show HN: Flash Kitty – Archive of Adobe/Macromedia Flash Movies from Flash Kit

flashkitty.gzalo.com

58 points by gzalo 4 days ago

After realizing a few months ago that the current flashkit owners didn't really back up any of the user submitted movies, and getting some Flash nostalgia, I created this working Flash Kit archive using data from the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive. It uses Raffle so you can watch the submitted movies in a modern browser without needing plugins.

It's not curated so you'll find a variety of things, some things are really creative and can be used for inspiration.

guidedlight 4 days ago

Great work. We definitely lost a prominent part of the Internet when Flash died.

Thanks Steve /s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

  • j45 3 days ago

    The loss was one thing

    Any conceivable replacement wasn’t ready to go either

    Apple wanted to block the walled garden of Flash for their own under any pretense possible for control.

    Flash was far from perfect. It’s still interesting to see new devs discovering what it could do 15-25 years ago and what is comparably mainstream when it exited.. up until now.

    • benoau 3 days ago

      > Apple wanted to block the walled garden of Flash for their own under any pretense possible for control.

      Just when it got to the point Flash could transpile to native iOS apps, Apple banned transpilation for six months or so at which point the DOJ was rumored to be investigating. By the time the ban was lifted there was virtually nothing being developed in Flash.

      Of course none of this would have been worth doing without also banning developers from mentioning, linking or communicating competing prices in apps or to app users to really isolate the gacha gamers from other spending funnels.

wslh 3 days ago

Back during the dot-com era, I created and wrote the story concept for a sci-fi Flash animation called Zeek [1]. It eventually aired on the Locomotion TV channel [2], which was later acquired by Sony. Several members of the team had experience working as illustrators with DC Comics.

It's important to highlight, especially in 2024, that Flash was the way to create this type of animation back then, as streaming was prohibitive for most internet connections around the world.

[1] http://swain.webframe.org/zeek.html (as SWF) and in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zeek+locomotion

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotion_(TV_channel)

  • doublerabbit 3 days ago

    My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was made in flash

    Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends was also made in flash.

    It's crazy that such a tool made it to the tv screen and then axed in one full swoop of a corp.

mclau156 4 days ago

any flash games?

  • gzalo 4 days ago

    Yes, in the games category you can find some. But for playing the classic fully fledged games I suggest something like https://flashpointarchive.org/ , which is more organized

numewhodis 3 days ago

why is this beginning to feel like the catholic church is about to get some competition? or the second coming, I'm not sure.